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“I can’t believe this,” Adolin said as he stared at the dead camp. Bodies were strewn across the clearing, all showing the symptoms Adolin and Kaladin had come to expect—bluish skin, bloody froth at the mouth, and not the faintest stirring of breath. He stalked back to where Kaladin was leaning against a tree, again attempting contact with the Kholin manor. “They can’t be all dead. After all, I’m still alive! We’re still alive!”
Kaladin, his android bodyguard, exhaled in frustration. “Adolin, we’ve been over this. We were camping alone when the virus hit, so these presumably came into contact with it much earlier.” He tapped a few more times on the phone, then pocketed it with a grimace. “That we’ve seen nothing but corpses doesn’t mean there aren’t any survivors, because they would have moved on.”
“I hope you’re right,” Adolin said. Storms, he needed his family to be alive. Didn’t his survival imply an immunity in the bloodline? Of course, Kaladin was an android, so he didn’t have to worry about his family and friends dying.
“Come on,” Adolin said. An anxiousness thrummed in the base of his skull, so much so that two days of frantic trekking hadn’t yet caught up to him. “Let’s get to the manor.”
———
Kaladin wanted to focus, but his head felt so heavy. He stood up from where they had been resting in an abandoned town square, and swayed, putting a hand on the wall for support.
Adolin cracked an eye. “Remember to find us some bicycles,” he said, long hair fanning out as he stretched. “Oh, and water. Food too. Probably won’t need too much, I’m not hungry and we’re only five days away.” Kaladin tensed, but Adolin didn’t comment further, instead shifting so that his back was to Kaladin.
“Of course,” he sighed. Kaladin slung their pack over his shoulder, and trekked down the main thoroughfare. As soon as he turned the bend, however, Kaladin stopped, and, casting a look over his shoulder, took out a slice of bread and downed it in three gulps. Then he knelt there on the sun-warmed stones, trying to figure out how to breathe without his lungs screaming agony.
The discomfort probably came from lack of practice.
He tried not to consider the more logical possibility.
———
“Do you ever think about what it means to be alive, botboy?” Adolin asked as they lay on a hill, looking up at the stars.
“I’m trying to sleep,” Kaladin said.
Adolin punched him good-naturedly on the arm. “Didn’t think the android would be the first to fall to fatigue. Either the advertising about not needing food or rest was fake, or I must be in better shape than I thought!”
Kaladin rolled his eyes and sat up slowly, running a hand through tousled locks. He looks and acts so human, Adolin thought, still surprised by Kaladin’s mannerisms after ten years under the same roof. He remembered his initial horror at his father’s purchase, the competitive tension, the grudging respect. And now…could he call it friendship, when Kaladin might not even be alive?
Kaladin stared into the deep blue expanse. “Life means the protection of others.”
Of course Kaladin, or the program running Kaladin, would give such an answer. Adolin felt a sudden rush of embarrassment at his earlier sentimentality. Whilst Maya, though sometimes unresponsive, was at least a warm, breathing creature, Kaladin was just a program on a chip. But he leaned in closer. “Surely, there must be more? Something beyond your initial dataset, something you’ve learned from living with us?”
Kaladin eyed him. “This is weird.”
Adolin flopped back down, defeated. It seemed he would have to struggle with the mortality of his family alone.
Beside him, Kaladin continued looking up, eyes sparkling with the light of a million stars.
———
“Hurry, Kal! We’re close!” Adolin shouted, running across the yard towards the silent manor.
Kaladin couldn’t see straight. “Go on ahead,” he managed, then the next moment he was on the ground, watering eyes staring through blades of grass as a wracking cough stole his breath away.
Adolin slowed, then stopped. He hesitated for a moment, then ran back to Kaladin. “Hey,” he said, stooping to put a hand on Kaladin’s shoulder. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” Kaladin said, and then he was coughing again, and the world was spinning and shaking, and it took all his strength to simply hold out his phone.
Adolin frowned as he took the phone and keyed in the password, because of course he knew Kaladin’s password. As Adolin read the pinned note, Kaladin listened to the rapid thudding of Adolin’s heart, no his heart, shallow breaths wheezing in and out of him like a blade scraping across stone.
———
TEN DAYS AGO
The moon was bright as Kaladin stood outside Adolin’s tent, listening to his breathing. Wind—cold, judging from the weather—blew across his face, and he tucked long, dark strands back behind his ear.
There it was again.
That hitch.
He’d received the reports two days ago. An influx of news reels, of disease and panic and death, right before the main server stopped responding and so did the Kholin manor. Though information on the plague was scarce, his current medical database was sufficient to identify the hitch.
Adolin Kholin was sick. If the pattern held here as it had everywhere else on the globe, Adolin Kholin was dying.
Kaladin took out his phone and double-checked the code. Then he ducked inside the tent, where Adolin was sleeping, blissfully unaware of the world and its woes. Kaladin had never anticipated he would celebrate having to keep constant watch lest the candles burn their camp down, but it was a rare twist of good fortune that Adolin preferred old-fashioned camping trips without modern electronics. Modern electronics apart from Kaladin, that was.
A few years ago, an incident, which Kaladin was fully responsible for, had forced an amputation of Adolin’s leg. To allow the prosthetic to function as well as (or better than, in Kaladin’s opinion) the original appendage, a microchip had been implanted in Adolin’s brain. Kaladin reviewed these facts as he held a napkin doused with dazewater over the man’s face. Then he lay down next to Adolin and Connected with the microchip. He found a full duplicate of Adolin’s memories stored there, much like Kaladin’s own memory drive. The drive in which Kaladin was forced to leave traces of the original programming, so that his fingers could obediently execute the code that would swap their memories and their faces in those memories, while also temporarily locking Adolin’s more animalistic instincts.
When Kaladin opened his eyes again, there was a hitch in his breathing, and—the mattress felt so soft.
———
PRESENT
Adolin felt his world crumbling.
“Why?” He asked, taking Kaladin by the shoulders almost violently. “Why, Kaladin? Why would you—” He broke off, trying to get enough air, but he didn’t need air anymore, did he? For he was wearing Kaladin’s body, and he Adolin’s. For Adolin was all alone, his family captured by surveillance footage dead, and the last remnant of his past life was being taken by the plague in his stead.
He remembered now, the passcode to his hidden memories falling into place. That he had blond hair instead of black, that he liked to eat onion rings more than French fries, that he enjoyed sleeping in his double bed. But he also remembered stepping out onto a factory floor, anger at being treated like a simple machine, then arguments and agreements, gambits and growth, and the beginnings of a tentative trust that bloomed into something wonderful. Spinning, blending, blurring, a flurry of memories battered Adolin, shredding him into pieces and rebuilding him whole.
Kaladin grasped Adolin’s hand. “What does it mean to be alive?” He whispered.
“The protection of others,” Adolin said, trying to scream, to cry, to let it out somehow but unable to in this body. He’d questioned the existence of emotion in androids, but now how he felt, how he hurt.
“The protection of those I love, Adolin,” Kaladin said, a tear—his first tear—his last—sliding down one cheek. “My family. That’s what I’ve learned,” He tried to say something more, but gritted his teeth in agony. “Live—live for me, and I’ll live on—” A violent fit of coughing took him, and Adolin could only grip his hand tighter, even as Kaladin slipped through his fingers.
———
There was movement in the bushes, and Adolin lifted his head to see Maya limping slowly towards him, tail wagging. Maya nuzzled into his neck, and Adolin wrapped his arms around her.
There he stayed for a long time, the last man on Earth. Until the sun danced lingering rays over the land, and shadows stretched long. For a moment before the onset of night, in that dying, glorious light, everything shone an eternal gold, and house and human and android and dog were still and beautiful and one.